Evacuees from the devastating blazes threatening Yellowknife say the ongoing fight between Meta, the owner of Facebook, and Canada’s federal government over who should pay for news has made it harder to spread life-saving information about the wildfires in the Northwest Territories.
Delaney Poitras, who lives in Fort Smith, N.W.T., made the decision to leave her community a few hundred kilometres from the capital on Friday, and head to the larger community of Hay River where she arranged to stay with family on Saturday. But on Sunday, Hay River was hit with an urgent evacuation order, so the family decamped again.
“I’ve never been evacuated in my life, and to do it twice in 24 hours, it was scary,” she told CBC News from Leduc, Alta., where she and her family have been staying at an evacuation centre while they wait to check in to a hotel.
Poitras says it’s bad enough having to handle the logistics of getting out in a hurry and worrying about what might happen to her home town while she’s gone, but the situation has been made worse by the ongoing fight between Big Tech and the Canadian government over who should pay for news.
Bill C-18, which recently became law, forces large social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and others to compensate Canadian news publishers when their content is shared. Meta has pushed back against the law and made good on its threat to instead block news from being shared on its platforms in Canada.
content from news providers like the CBC, local newspaper The Yellowknifer and digital broadcaster Cabin Radio is being blocked, which means people can’t get or share critical information from news sources on Facebook and Instagram, two of the most popular social media sites.
The debate over Bill C-18, known as the Online News Act, may be an academic one in many parts of Canada, but not in the North, where people are dealing with an unfolding natural disaster while suddenly being unable to use one of the most popular communication platforms to share information about wildfire locations and evacuation plans.
Poitras says social media is important where they live. “It’s how we all keep in touch.”
A line of vehicles stretches along Highway 3, the main road out of Yellowknife, as people leave the city to escape approaching wildfires. Evacuees say the emergency situation has been made worse by the fact that news sources are being blocked on Facebook, due to an ongoing fight between Meta and the Canadian government over who should pay for news. (Pat Kane/Reuters)
A live news conference covered by Cabin Radio and CBC on Wednesday evening announced the evacuation of Yellowknife, but it wasn’t shareable on Facebook, prompting users like Poitras and others to try to get around the block by posting screengrabs of information instead of direct links.
“It’s difficult to find the correct information to share to all the people that I have on Facebook,” she said, “but I try to do my best to make sure that it’s correct.”
The territorial government has provided the following information for residents:
Though she and others are trying to help, Poitras says it’s a flawed system that’s becoming dangerous.
“In our community, the protective services and the RCMP were going door to door. I guess some people … didn’t answer the door or just weren’t aware that this was even going on.”
‘Stupid and dangerous’
Ollie Williams, the editor of Yellowknife-based Cabin Radio, says Meta’s move to ban news is “stupid and dangerous and clearly should not be in place.”
But he also blames the federal government for picking this fight in the first place.
Delaney Poitras lives in Fort Smith, N.W.T., but was recently evacuated to Leduc, Alta., because of the wildfires. She says Facebook is a major communication platform in the North and the ban makes it difficult to find the correct information to share. (Anis Heydari/CBC)
“Clearly, I’m not a fan of news being banned, but I want to make very clear that I’m not a fan of anyone involved in it — and I think there are lots of actors,” he told CBC News from Fort Simpson, where Cabin Radio has been reporting from ever since wildfires threatened the territorial capital.
But Williams says he’s been pleasantly surprised by how well his audience has worked around the ban to get and share information.
Every night after his shift, he checks Facebook and Instagram and says “it’s just screengrab after screengrab after screengrab of our updates shared by our audience to their friends.”
Williams credits the audience for coming directly to their website, which he says has seen as much traffic in the past few days as it normally would in an entire year.
“Let’s not just sit here and complain about Meta and complain about the ban and say, ‘Well, this is stupid’ — it is. Let’s also say how heartening it is that there’s a wildfire situation and the audience, the people who consume the news, have just put Meta to one side and said ‘All right, well, that’s useless,’ and gone straight to the source.”
Leave Yellowknife as quickly as you can, mayor says
Rebecca Alty, the mayor of Yellowknife, says crews are working hard on fire defences, but she is urging people to ‘take what you need’ and get out of the city.
Meta’s response
Meta has faced pressure to loosen the ban due to the current situation. But in a statement to CBC News, the company says it’s sticking to its position — and notes that government sites and other sources that disseminate information aren’t subject to the ban.
“People in Canada are able to use Facebook and Instagram to connect to their communities and access reputable information, including content from official government agencies, emergency services and non-governmental organisations,” said Meta spokesperson David Troya-Alvarez.
The company has also activated a function known as Safety Check that allows users to click a button to update their status and let their friends and family know they’re safe from the wildfires.
Safety Check was used for previous natural disasters, but Meta activated it for the N.W.T. wildfires on Thursday.
Yellowknife wildfires: How do you evacuate an entire city of 22,000 people?
Almost 22,000 people have been ordered to evacuate Yellowknife, N.W.T., as wildfires are expected to reach the capital on Saturday, officials say. Here’s a look at the plans put in place to clear out the city.
Misinformation a worry, evacuee says
Northerners like Kelsey Worth say the situation is dangerous, not just because it’s hard to find and share information, but because in the vacuum left by news, misinformation seems to be spreading faster.
“When it comes to how far away the fire is, that’s definitely been a concern for everybody, because I know there’s been a lot of misinformation about where it is and what’s going on with it,” the Yellowknife resident told CBC News from the North Arm Territorial Park, where they stopped on their way out of town Thursday.
“I watch the satellite maps now because I can’t get an accurate number on where it’s at.”
She says cellular service is spotty in the territory at the best of times, and the blocking of reputable news on social media makes it even harder to share accurate information.
For instance, on Thursday morning, Worth said her parents told her they’d heard that the highway was closed at 10 a.m.
“But it wasn’t,” she said. “I mean, I drove through it about 11.”
Worth is one of many people sharing screenshots of news stories, something she wishes she didn’t have to do.
“I avoid saying where it comes from because the second you say it comes from a radio station or a news outlet, they block you,” she said, noting several friends have told her that they aren’t very aware of the situation in the territory.
“They don’t even know that we’re literally surrounded by fires.”
In an emailed statement, the government reiterated its stance on Thursday, telling CBC News that it is “deeply disappointed” Meta is continuing with its “irresponsible, unreasonable” policy of blocking news on its platforms.
“This includes Northern communities that rely on it as an information source,” a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said.
“More than ever, this kind of dangerous situation shows how having more access to trustworthy and reliable information and news is vital for so many of our communities to be informed about the current emergency.”
Nicole Gill is the executive director of Accountable Tech, a U.S. based advocacy group that — as she puts it — “holds big tech accountable for the harms that they inflict on democracy, society, and our health and well-being.”
She says the wildfire situation in Northern Canada underlines just how serious the fight between governments and Big Tech is.
“I’m thinking a lot lately about the fires in Maui and how when such a rapid news event happens, especially a natural disaster, people turn to websites, the apps, and systems that they’re most comfortable with,” she told CBC News in an interview. “And Facebook has made itself a part of that ecosystem.”
She says the world is watching the Canadian dispute closely, as numerous other jurisdictions have similar laws planned, and Meta has clearly “decided to use Canada as a bit of a test population to try this out and see how far they can force the government to go before perhaps keeping or coming to the bargaining table.
“This is a way that they can almost test run some of these tactics with a different population, because they’re most certainly not going to restrict news from their home state where California where media and all of these Silicon Valley companies are based.”
Emergency situations raise the stakes
Greg Taylor, associate professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary, says the ongoing wildfire situation perfectly encapsulates the seriousness of the fight between the government and Big Tech.
“This is far more than simply an annoyance right now. This is a matter — in some cases literally — of survival,” he said in an interview.
“You can argue back and forth about the bill itself that’s underlying this, but at the core … it’s an emergency and citizens need access to information and Facebook is not there for them right now,” he said.
“I think it shows that there are some real concerns with Facebook being where we go in times of an emergency.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
